What exactly is Political Science?

Thus the mere definition of political science as the study of decision making provides little guidance in differentiating political decisions from other kinds of decisions. The adoption of decision making as the major focus would, to be sure, provide us with a general theory of social decision making, which would undoubtedly throw some light on our understanding of decision processes in a political context

New Zealand Leads in Women’s Rights
Long before the U.S. or England allowed their women to vote, the Republic of New Zealand was paving the way.

But we would still need criteria by which to isolate political decisions from other kinds of decisions. The concept in and of itself is insufficient to delineate, even at the grossest level, the range of data that any initial description of political science would have to include.

On the whole, the efforts at describing the broad range of interests of political science have been less than successful in the decades following the turn of the twentieth century. Institutional definitions, such as government and the state, merely serve to define one unknown, political science, by other unknowns.

In 1893, Lord Glasgow signed a new Electoral Act allowing all women to vote in parliamentary elections. Through the work and massive petitioning of women like Kate Sheppard, the act was able to be passed 27 years before it was in the United States

Functional conceptualizations based on power and decision making go well beyond any range of interests that political scientists would at least intuitively seek to embrace within their discipline.

Gandhi Mainstreams Nonviolence
While the British ruled India, there were many who wanted to put them out through means of force. This all changed on September 11,

Each description of the subject matter of political science has something to commend it, if only because no one way of accounting for the intrinsic cohesion of any field is either the only or the necessarily correct one.

Each mode of conceptualization creates its own blind spots and opens its own unique windows on political reality. The adequacy of any formal definition will depend on the extent to which it gives a sufficiently general description of the subject matter so that past and current content areas accepted by most scholars are not excluded–or if they are, it is with convincing theoretical justification.

1906 when Mohandas Gandhi addressed a meeting of 3,000 Indians in the Empire Theatre building in Johannesburg and asked them to take an oath to resist white colonial rule without violence. It would ultimately lead to nonviolence being the means through which Indian independence was achieved.

No more than for sociologists, economists, anthropologists, or psychologists is it appropriate for political scientists to presume to adopt the total behavior of a society as their special concern.

We Will Fight Them on the Beaches
These famous words were spoken by then Prime Minister Winston Churchill of England during the days of World War II.

Rather, from all social interactions, political science can abstract only those kinds which its theoretical perspectives dictate to be political in nature.

. It is an interesting time in political science because it was one of the first times a people was addressed on the radio during a war and were inspired to fight back not only on their own shores, but across the globe. It all happened on June 4, 1940.

In this sense, politics as a field of study is analytically distinct from the other disciplines. By the same reasoning, since each discipline directs its special attention to only one aspect of the total aggregate of interactions called society, no one discipline is “more basic” than or prior to the others.

And the above 25 interesting facts about the history of political science are just some of the few moments that have shaped our nations and our world.

We may describe the political system as that behavior or set of interactions through which authoritative allocations (or binding decisions) are made and implemented for a society (Easton 1953; 1965a; 1965b).

Be sure and research your favorites more, as each fact contains tons of other facts leading to and surrounding them that are worth knowing.

The implications of this thumbnail definition are enormous, and here we can examine only the most salient ones.

Scarcity prevails in all societies. This is a fundamental starting point for political analysis

There are not enough of the values (valued things) to meet the wants of the members of a society. This is as vital a political assumption as it is a sociological, anthropological, and economic one.

Differences and conflicts over values in scarce supply cannot be avoided. In most controversies, members in all societies are able to negotiate settlements independently, without the intervention of any special agency speaking in the name of the society.

Integration of social behavior is in large part a consequence of the independent interaction of members as dictated by their personalities, the social structure, and the culture.

Through such autonomous behavior they are able to adjust their differences, however acceptable or distasteful any resolution may be to the participants.

But in all societies there are always some valued things over which differences cannot be easily negotiated by the members themselves.